The debate over the so-called “environmental impact” of data centers provides an easy target for environmentalists to pick on — big creepy corporations like Facebook and Apple. While these folks sleep at night with their hot water tanks cranked to the max and half the lights in their houses still turned on, companies that run big data centers get needled for using a lot of electricity. Yet just try to take away these people’s iPhones and Facebook games–then stand back and watch the intellectual dishonesty spill out like a broken water balloon.
The answer, of course, is solar power. Clean, silent, low-maintenance, and emissions-free. Well, sort-of. But Wired tells us today that solar farms aren’t efficient. Based on their figures, I decided to extrapolate a few solar farm scenarios.
Facebook’s data center is a 100-megawatt consumer, and its solar array, which spans acres and acres in the Oregon outback, puts out a mere .05 megawatts at an average energy conversion efficiency of about 14%. Apple’s planned N.C. solar farm will cost 180 acres of God’s green earth and will put out just 3.5 megawatts at typical efficiency (Apple will require at least 70 MW at their N.C. data center). Using those ratios, and keeping in mind that these are the best, most efficient solar generators on the planet, we could estimate that:
- A typical .3 kw household would require 0.154 acre of this top-of-the-line solar technology. That would fill a typical suburban lot, and leave no room for the house. Underground housing, anybody?
. - A typical 3.5 acre city block, containing 16 households, would require 2.5 acres of solar array. Yep–two and a half football fields. (BTW, forget about trees in that neighborhood.)
. - New York City, some 325 square miles in size, if it were filled only with these houses, would require a solar array the size of Chicago, which weighs in at about 250 square miles.
- The United States would require about three states the size of Texas filled only with solar farms and nothing else to fulfill its electricity needs. The distribution system for this electricity (power lines, AC turbines, etc.) would require a further two states the size of Colorado.
My conclusions:
- Mass-market electrical consumption cannot be serviced by solar generation without regulated rationing. Most Americans would not be in love with this idea.
- The obsession with solar energy has as much to do with politics as it does with shrinking the fossil fuel industries.
- Data centers should concentrate, if they believe fossil and nuclear power generation are harmful to humanity, on reducing their consumption of electricity.